Fucking Disco

Joshua Pathon recently took out the Soundpond Spin DJ Comp with Faint One under their Fucking Disco moniker. Josh is 1/3rd of Ba-Doop and 1/2 of The Manuel Portio. With exclusive behind the scenes access of the type not seen since The Womans Weekly paid $200k to Shane and Simone Warne, Wol took Josh out of his comfort zone and forced him to talk about himself with a hard hitting interview dressed as Derryn Hinch’s beard.

There were a lot of blinking lights, fader moves, button presses and knob tweaks, for the uninitiated, talk us through the Fucking Disco setup and performance routine:

We used four turntables and two laptops both running Serato. I run the Native Instruments X1 midi controller to trigger cue points and loops while Paul has the Novation Dicers to do pretty much the same thing. My preferred mixer is the Rane TTm56 while Paul likes the Pioneer Nexus 900. We also had an MPC triggering one shots and percussion too.

How does scratching on Serato compare to vinyl and how long have you been scratching for?

Guess I have been playing around with turntables and scratching for 10 years or so, it really is what got me inspired to get into Deejaying. I bought my first battle records not long after buying decks and tried to learn all the different techniques by watching things like DMC. In more recent years I have been focusing on production and not really doing much in the way of turntable stuff until the Spin Dj comp came up. It definitely inspired me to dust of some of my scratching skills. As far a Serato goes it really does bring the best of both worlds to Deejaying and more so to the turntablist side of things. The feel of scratching on serato is exactly the same as on a records with no lag what so ever, the record never skips which could sometimes be a problem using records. The main advantage is the cue points, being able to jump to any part of the record instantly opens up so much room for creativity. Being able to edit tracks in something like Ableton and play them on a turntable straight away has obvious advantages too.

How much practice and pre-planning goes into a half hour set like this?:

We practice quite a lot for this particular comp. Doing our set on four decks required everything to be much more planned than free styling. The set was built over a few weeks with a long session in the studio then a couple weeks of just practice.

Part of the prize pack from Soundpond was a set at the Future Music Festival, how was it and was there hookers and blow backstage?

Ha! We enjoyed playing there, was cool to get a little taste of spinning at a festival, unfortunately we didn’t get to do our thing on four decks with on CDjs available to mix on but still was a very cool experience.

Faint One appears (to a non DJ like me) to possess great DJ skills, how good is he?

He’s definitely one of the most talented Deejays I have seen, coming from a Hiphop background he has crazy turntable skills which he applies to mixing all styles of music earning him a much deserved rep about the place. After my 12 or so years of Deejaying I’m still learning new tricks from him and it’s inspired me to try and push my skills on the decks. He has a big future ahead of him thats for sure.

Any plans for more Fucking Disco?

We have been working away in the studio on some new Big Room Disco tunes that we will drop soon and a bunch of edits we will give away soon too. As far as shows go we really want to push the four turntable thing, not many people seem to be doing it and it gives us a chance to showcase something a little different. Keep your eyes out for F.D. over the next few months…